Sami's Silver Lining

by Cathy Cassidy

  ‘We look OK,’ Lee declares.

  ‘We look amazing!’ Marley corrects him. ‘This could be such great publicity for us. We need to find it online and copy the link and share it everywhere …’

  ‘Shhhh!’ everyone hisses, and the camera closes in on Ked and Louisa talking about libraries to Lexie, Bex and Happi, and then moves to Marley, Lee and Sasha talking about the Lost & Found. I scan the screen and see myself, trying to blend into the background as usual and failing miserably. I am too tall, too scruffy to be in any way invisible. My hair is such a bird’s nest I almost expect to see a couple of sparrows perched on it, and the overcoat … well, I can see how ratty it looks.

  I can see why Marley hates it, and Aunt Zenna and Mr Simpson the head teacher. I can see why people laugh at it and make snarky comments. Lexie slides a hand into mine and squeezes, as if to tell me that she likes me anyway, scruff or not.

  The camera zooms in on a shot of Sasha onstage, her sweet, clear voice singing the lyrics to the ‘Library Song’, and as the shot pulls back we get to see ourselves properly, up there on a festival stage, owning that stage, owning the crowd, the song a perfect slice of raw emotion and library love. We’re good … really good. We work together as if instinctively, make it all look natural and easy.

  I wish my family could see this. They’d be proud of me, I know they would.

  But this was filmed a month ago … and since then the band has fallen apart.

  It’s hard to imagine us being able to limp through even one song, let alone the set we aced at the festival. Glancing at Marley, I know he can see this too; this footage is a powerful reminder of how far we’d come and also how far we’ve let things slip.

  The footage switches to Ked Wilder’s set, a study in joyful, upbeat sixties pop, and then a final interview in which Ked implores Millford Council to keep the libraries open, and tells viewers to watch out for the Lost & Found’s meteoric rise to fame.

  ‘We underestimate kids these days,’ he says. ‘We write them off as lazy, feckless, waiting for us to hand them the world on a plate. Well, I’m here to tell you that we’ve got it all wrong – these kids, the Lost & Found, are proof of that. Twelve teenagers who’ve only been playing together for a matter of weeks have held us all spellbound with their talent, energy and sheer determination, and that’s something I haven’t seen in quite a while. I’ll be keeping in touch with these kids, helping them as much as I can – I’d love to help them get into the recording studio, help bring some of these powerful, original songs of theirs to a wider audience!’

  ‘Wow,’ Lexie breathes, at my side. ‘He really does believe in us!’

  ‘Well, he would if he wasn’t stuck in Provence,’ Marley mutters.

  On screen, Ked Wilder puts on his black fedora and pulls the brim down, laughing. ‘Mark my words,’ he says. ‘These kids have something very special. Remember the name – the Lost & Found. This won’t be the last time you hear it! And now that I’ve ventured out of retirement to have some fun with old friends and new ones, it won’t be the last you hear of me either!’

  The camera cuts to a shot of Ked giving Louisa one last hug before sliding into the driving seat of his Triumph Spitfire and waving from the window as he drives into the sunset.

  ‘Goodness,’ Ms Winter says, dabbing her eyes with what looks like a paint rag. ‘He’s wonderful, isn’t he? And what a great showcase for you all!’

  ‘We’re famous!’ Lexie grins. ‘Thank you, Ms Winter, for telling us it was on – and letting us watch together! It was amazing!’

  ‘It was!’ the old lady agrees. ‘It really was!’

  I stack up the empty glasses and take them through to the big, old-fashioned kitchen, and Ms Winter follows with the empty lemonade jug and the remains of the chocolate digestives.

  ‘Thank you, Sami,’ she says. ‘You and Lexie must pop in one day soon – there are a couple of things I wanted to ask you about. I’ll make more lemonade, maybe even some cake …’

  ‘That sounds good,’ I say politely, wondering why Lexie and I are the only ones to get an extra invite. ‘I’ll tell her.’

  ‘You do that!’

  I say goodbye and join the others, heading for home through the darkened grounds of Greystones.

  ‘That was incredible,’ Bex says. ‘Inspiring!’

  ‘No,’ Marley growls. ‘That was a wake-up call.’

  For once, I think I agree with Marley.

  10

  The Notebook

  By the weekend, Lexie and I have worked our way through half of the dates list. As well as the park picnic, we’ve eaten chips wrapped in white paper, fed the ducks with a paper bag of cornmeal that cost 10p from the park visitor centre, drunk iced coffees in the Leaping Llama, been to the cinema (a Disney film) and now we are wandering around the art gallery in town.

  After the last few years, it seems amazing and wonderful to do such simple things and find happiness in them. I thought I had forgotten how, but Lexie helps me to see that isn’t so.

  We look at piles of rusty scrap metal and wall-sized canvases that look like an over-sized toddler has flung his dinner at them. We study bright abstract images where every face seems to have several noses, an extra eye, a grimacing mouth filled with tombstone teeth. I don’t like all of them, but they fascinate me. There are about a million ways to make sense of the world, but art is probably the most awesome.

  We find Louisa Winter’s famous painting of a sad-eyed woman holding a fox at the top of a staircase, and although it is very different from anything else I’ve ever seen, I love it. Ms Winter is Millford’s most famous artist, but somehow it’s hard to link this powerful canvas with the eccentric elderly lady with paintbrushes in her hair who owns Greystones and hangs out with legendary 1960s pop stars.

  Lexie seems mesmerized. ‘It makes my head spin,’ she says. ‘Like I’m so, so close to understanding … well, life, the universe, everything. If I could just work out what the picture is trying to say to me! Does that sound crazy?’

  ‘Not to me,’ I tell her. ‘It’s a great painting. A part of you wants to understand it totally, and another part knows you never can …’

  Lexie links an arm through mine.

  ‘That’s another one ticked off the dates list,’ Lexie comments. ‘It’s a shame we’re halfway through. What happens when we run out? Should we think up some new date ideas?’

  ‘Definitely,’ I agree. ‘Lots of them! Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. Although, to be fair, I think I could sit in an empty room with you for hours on end and never get bored.’

  ‘You say the sweetest things!’ she teases. ‘An empty room?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ I argue. ‘Thanks for coming here with me … I’ve loved it. The Louisa Winter painting is incredible. I knew she was a force of nature, but I had no clue how talented she is as an artist.’

  ‘I know!’ Lexie agrees. ‘I hate to admit it, but I’d never even heard of her until Jake found us the old railway carriage to practise in. Weird, huh?’

  We’re walking hand in hand out of the gallery building when I spot a little heap of flyers on the information desk beside the exit. It’s Louisa Winter’s name that jumps out at me first, and then the mention of a refugee charity called Footsteps to Freedom.

  My heart starts to race.

  ‘Look,’ I say to Lexie. ‘Look at this!’

  The flyer is advertising an exhibition of Louisa Winter’s newest paintings, which will run from the start of October, with all proceeds going to help the refugee charity.

  ‘Wow,’ Lexie breathes. ‘She really is awesome, isn’t she?’

  ‘No, Lexie, listen,’ I say. ‘This charity … I mean … I know them. They are amazing people. They helped me – they helped me so much. Without them, I would never have got to England!’

  Once the words start tumbling out, I want to tell her everything – what happened in Greece, what happened afterwards, the coat, the fear, the hunger, the hopelessness. I want to explain that
the charity Louisa Winter is fundraising for saved my life, but the words are stuck in my throat like shards of broken glass. Unexpectedly, my eyes flood with hot tears and I have to pull away. I let go of Lexie’s hand, and the flyer falls crumpled to the floor.

  I bite the inside of my cheek until it bleeds, drag the sleeve of my overcoat across my eyes. We’re outside now, the sunshine bright, and Lexie knows somehow that I need space to get myself together, space to calm down. I sit cross-legged in the shade of a weeping willow and wonder what it could be that makes a tree weep, ribbons of leaves falling down to the ground like tears.

  Lexie heads to an ice-cream van with a long queue and buys two cornets with chocolate flakes and strawberry sauce. By the time she comes back, the past has receded again, like the ocean at low tide. I know it will come back … it always does.

  ‘Ice cream from a proper British ice-cream van,’ Lexie says, grinning. ‘That’s another one ticked off the list.

  I am glad that Lexie is not the kind of girl to make a fuss, and that she understands that sometimes a tidal wave of pain can catch you unawares and almost pull you under. We are silent for a while, eating the sweet, cool ice cream.

  ‘If you ever want to talk … well, I’ll listen,’ she says quietly. ‘I won’t tell anyone else, I promise.’

  I shake my head. ‘I can’t,’ I say, and my voice has dropped to a whisper. ‘I can’t talk about it. I wish I could. Too hard.’

  I know that if I could talk to anyone about the past, anyone at all, it would be Lexie – but where would I start? With the sound of bombs and gunfire we heard every night from our house in Damascus? With a beach on Kos? A boy walking until the soles of his boots wore clean away? Images flash into my mind, each one twisting my heart with pain. Collecting ring pulls and silver paper from the roadside, playing the flute while Nazz and Joe ran along behind me, Amira dancing ahead in her ragged princess dress and broken fairy wings.

  I push the memories away.

  I would like someone to understand. I’d like Lexie to, and there is a way I can do that without saying a single word. My fingers shake as I slide the little notebook out of my pocket, hold it out to her.

  ‘Um …’ she says. ‘Your drawings, right?’

  But then she opens the book and sees it all – the writing, the sketches, the pain. Sometimes I think the pages must be stained with blood and salt water and tears, but they’re not, of course.

  The notebook was my social worker’s idea; it’s what I’m supposed to do with my thoughts, fears, memories. I can’t talk about those things – the words lodge in my throat like a tangle of barbed wire. They cannot be spoken, but somehow I can sketch and write my memories in the pages of my notebook.

  ‘I’m not asking you to share what you write with me,’ Ben had said. ‘Not if you don’t want to. I’m just asking you to acknowledge the past … If something comes to the surface, even if it’s something painful, write it down. Let it out, Sami. OK?’

  These days, when the past seeps into my bloodstream like poison, I find words and pictures to give it shape. Somehow, it lessens the ache. I write in English, because that is my language now; the words I grew up with, words in Kurdish and Arabic, belong to a different life.

  I watch Lexie as she leafs through the notebook. Her fingers smooth the pages, reading a story that’s so painful, so personal, I have kept it hidden from every other human being I know. There is the sketch of my mother’s face, the drawing of the tented encampment on the Turkish border, the picture of the boat that sank in the Aegean. These words and images are my truth, my darkness.

  I shut my eyes and let the shimmering ribbons of willow shade my skin, and when I open my eyes again Lexie is staring at me, her eyes brimming with tears.

  ‘No words,’ she whispers, and she puts her arms around me, presses her cheek against mine, beneath the willow tree in the bright August sunshine.

  11

  Pretty Street

  Nobody in the whole wide world knows more about me now than Lexie Lawlor. It’s a terrifying thought but an exhilarating one too.

  My shoulders feel lighter, stronger, as if someone has lifted away a rucksack full of pain that I’ve been carrying for way too long. I remember the rucksack I carried on my journey … I remember packing it, the day we left home to travel north to my father’s brother in Latakia, near the Turkish border.

  ‘Pack only the essentials,’ my father had said. ‘When we get to London, we will start again. There, everything will be better!’

  I remember my mother’s eyes, defeated even then, and I’d made sure to pack my hopes and dreams into that rucksack along with the shirts, the T-shirts, the warm jumper. I packed my flute too, slung across my body in a plastic case inside a canvas carrier. My sister Roza wore her best party dress, the colour of the ocean, and my mother wore the emerald-green scarf with the rose print and the silky fringing that my father had bought for her on her last birthday. My father was smart and formal in a tweed overcoat with a grey satin lining that he’d tailored himself. I put on my best pair of boots and a new padded jacket, even though the weather was warm, and I hauled the rucksack on to my back.

  I lost that rucksack in the sea, but the flute survived and the aid workers gave me a new rucksack. As my journey went on, it grew heavier and heavier; I acquired a sleeping bag, a small tent, a new pair of boots. I think it was the pain, though, that really weighed my rucksack down. It may have been invisible, but the weight of it almost broke me, and even when I set my rucksack down for the final time, on the shiny laminate floor of my aunt and uncle’s flat in Millford, the weight of that pain pressed down on me still.

  I thought I would carry it forever, but when I handed Lexie my notebook yesterday, something shifted. It feels like someone else is helping to carry the burden now, for a while at least.

  Marley calls an all-band meeting in the Leaping Llama to announce his plan to get the Lost & Found back on track. It’s not what anyone expects.

  ‘Covers,’ he declares, sipping frappuccino from a jam-jar glass. ‘That’s what we need. A rock-solid catalogue of top-quality covers to educate us about how the legends did it …’

  ‘Covers?’ I say to Lexie, thinking of quilts and blankets and wondering how they could possibly help our playing. ‘I don’t get it!’

  ‘That’s what they call it when you play someone else’s song,’ she explains.

  ‘Oh …’

  Marley has always been against playing other people’s songs on principle, but now that he and Lexie are no longer dating their songwriting output has plunged to zero. With inspiration at an all-time low and a tone-deaf keyboardist to work around, we definitely need something to give us a jump-start.

  ‘We’re getting stale,’ Marley decrees. ‘Messing things up that we should know inside out. The pressure’s off and we’ve let ourselves drift, and that’s bad news. I’ve been reading this library book about how Ked Wilder made the big time – and there’s no magic formula. He puts it down to practice, pure and simple. It makes sense, right? The more you practise, the better you get.’

  He frowns at Bobbi-Jo, who seems to be the exception to this rule, then ploughs on.

  ‘Ked Wilder played a gig a day for an entire year, apparently, and lots of the songs he played were covers. He reckons he learned all he needed to know about songwriting from playing those covers … like a kind of masterclass in lyrics and melodies and hooks.’

  ‘Hooks?’ Bobbi-Jo echoes, fiddling with her straw. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘A song’s hook is the catchy bit that gets you singing along,’ Jake tells her. ‘The bit that fixes itself in your head and gets you humming the tune.’

  ‘I knew that,’ Bobbi-Jo sniffs. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘So we learn ten new songs,’ Marley continues. ‘I’ve chosen ten summer classics, each with something different to teach us, each hugely popular and successful. The discipline will be good for us, and if we pick up any gigs over the next few weeks we can slip a few
in along with our originals to bring our set up to the right length. OK?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Lee says. ‘I agree, we need something to kick us out of our comfort zone. Any plans to get us some gigs?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Marley admits. ‘But Bobbi-Jo and I have some plans in the pipeline. We’ll keep you posted once we know more, but if things work out as hoped … Well, put it this way, getting gigs won’t be a problem.’

  ‘Bobbi-Jo and I have some plans?’ Bex repeats. ‘You’re making plans without telling the rest of us? I thought we were a team?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Bobbi-Jo snaps. ‘You’re so touchy! Does everything have to be a team decision? Like what shoes I’m going to wear tomorrow? What I should have for my tea? We’re doing this for the band and as soon as there’s anything to tell, you’ll know!’

  ‘Er … what Bobbi-Jo said,’ Marley echoes. ‘Sort of …’

  Bex looks mutinous and the row seems likely to escalate, but at that moment three teenagers swagger over to the table. They look a bit like kids dressed up for a fancy-dress party, with low-slung black Levis, white hi-tops and baseball caps worn backwards. The skinniest, spottiest guy, who is wearing a new denim jacket with a Run-DMC patch, pulls a few bizarre hand gestures and offers his palm to Marley for a high five. Marley, looking totally confused, sticks his hand in the air and allows it to be slapped.

  ‘Cool to meet you, man,’ the kid says in a broad Brummie accent. ‘Marley, right? And you must all be the Lost & Found.’

  ‘Er – yes,’ Marley says.

  ‘I’m T-Dawg,’ the boy explains. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you, and I expect you’ve heard about us; we’re Pretty Street!’

  Marley tries not to smirk. ‘The rap band? Seriously?’

  ‘Oh, we’re serious all right,’ T-Dawg says. ‘We’re Millford’s answer to Eminem. Or Stormzy, maybe. So we just wanted to borrow Bobbi-Jo for a little while, OK? We’re old friends, aren’t we? Go back a long way. And we wanted to ask some advice – can you spare a minute, Bobbi-Jo? If that’s OK with the rest of you?’